


self-portrait as tender mercenary

by arbitrarily



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Choking, Consensual But Not Safe Or Sane, Episode Tag, F/M, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Power Play, Sibling Incest, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-06 18:40:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20511671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: The condemned man wants the noose to finally tighten.





	self-portrait as tender mercenary

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the (near) immediate aftermath of 2.04. Title from the poem of the same name by Rebecca Hazelton.

He deserves what he deserves.

[...]

One animal to another.

REBECCA HAZELTON

She has to ask Jess for the address to Kendall’s new place. She knew that he had moved the same way she knew most things about her brothers: osmosis, collected without regard to the information provided. Roman was at Brightstar management training. Connor hired an opposition research consultant. Kendall had a new apartment. Information that didn’t matter until she needed it. 

The doorman won’t let her in without first buzzing up to Kendall.

“I’m his sister,” Shiv says. The doorman looks at her with vague interest, like maybe he’s trying to find Kendall in her. He won’t: there’s no resemblance. She’s always liked that, nothing of herself to be found in her brothers. Where she’s fair and light, Kendall is dark. Kendall is wide-eyed, thick-lipped. Her own facial features skew narrower, as if pressed firm and suspicious. He, like, Connor and Roman, is built slight and lean. Shiv used to resent her curves, as if having an ass belied femininity and therefore was a weakness. A woman like her, she thought, should be built like her name—bladed, sharp, capable of drawing blood.

“I really am, his sister. You wanna see my driver’s license?” The doorman doesn’t blink at her snide tone. Instead, he picks up the phone and holds up a finger. He tucks the phone tight between his shoulder and jaw. She can’t hear the voice on the other end—Kendall’s voice—but she knows it must be there, he stands up that much straighter. He never takes his eyes off of her, even as he speaks to her brother. 

“Yes, Mr. Roy, a Miss Roy is here to see you.” He nods. Still holding the phone, and still looking at her, he says, “Mr. Roy says you may come up now.”

Kendall meets her at the door. He’s dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a sweater, both purposefully designed to look well-worn and used. His collar is stretched, baring his long neck, the jump of his throat when he swallows. 

Shiv slows her pace as she steps closer. The elevator dings closed behind her. There are only two doors—the exit through the stairwell and his. Kendall’s body is wired tight even as he leans against the doorjamb, a mostly empty glass cupped in his hand like an offering. 

“So this is you living in squalor then?” she says. Mockery is easy. “Thought I’d find more dirty needles lying around. A dead prostitute or two.” She’s in front of him now. He, par for the course, looks like shit. Bags under his eyes, a tiredness that has made itself known in the lines drawn around his hang-dog mouth. 

“Jess told me you asked her, where I’ve been living.” He stands up straighter and steps out of the way. He lets her pass, into the apartment. He shuts the door behind them and finishes off the remains of his drink. 

“That your way of telling me you’ve been expecting me?” Shiv says idly. From what she can see, his apartment is sparse. Less so in a deliberate minimalist monk _Architectural Digest_ circle jerk kind of way but more as sad and transient. Empty. There aren’t any pictures anywhere, not overpriced art and not of his family. His kids. It’s just the view, panes of glass open on the city, inky and glittering, stretched out around and below them. She can’t say it doesn’t suit him. 

“Yeah. Maybe.” Shiv purses her lips as she looks over to him. Whatever odd intimacy they shared the other night is gone now. There’s an expectant blankness to his face, like she interrupted something by coming here. 

“Let’s get you a drink,” he finally says. 

He leaves her to drop her coat by the front door and disappears into his apartment. She follows him. He has one lamp lit, between the bar and the pair of sofas that look more uncomfortable than inviting. The bar is the lone part of the place that looks lived-in: used glasses, open bottles, a mess of the collegiate kind. 

Kendall hands her a glass without a word. He raises his own in an equally silent salute. 

Shiv sits down. Takes a sip and glances at the coffee table between them. She lifts an eyebrow. Coke residue is obvious on the black lacquer top. 

“So,” she says. “You’re not only off the wagon but you’re not even looking for the trail, huh?”

“I’m fine, Shiv.”

“Yeah, okay, you’re fine.” They both know she’s only here because the opposite is true. 

She takes another sip. It’s good whiskey, wasted on him. Awkwardness stretches between them as neither speaks.She glances past his shoulder at her own fuzzy reflection in the darkened windows. Small talk is an alien concept in their family. They have always dropped right into it, fuck the foreplay. But then, it’s not only small talk. It’s direct and open communication. It’s a conversation. None of them learned how to do that without an ulterior motive. 

Kendall is looking at her with a patience that doesn’t fit him. She doesn’t like it, and she doesn’t trust it. It occurs to her as she twists at her wedding band that her and Kendall have never really done this sort of thing. Dropping in on each other, getting together, shooting the shit. If that’s anyone in this family to her, it’s Roman. It’s Connor and his all too often check-in phone calls. Maybe she has always seen Kendall as competition and maybe he always has been. He was granted the benefit of the doubt by virtue of birth order and nothing more. A resentment as old and known as anything else about herself is close at hand and it’s easy to slip into, like an old and familiar jacket. 

She fixes her eyes on him. He doesn’t fidget and he does not try to dodge her gaze. There is something incredibly off about him, like he doesn’t know how to live inside his own skin. She can’t decide if that’s new or if he simply got tired of hiding it. He holds himself like every part of him hurts even if his face is currently shuttered and vacant. 

He's the one to give first. “So, how’s Tom? How’s ATN going for him?”

Small talk after all, she thinks wryly. She shrugs. “He’s good. It’s going. The news continues to air. Senior citizens are arming themselves to the teeth. Business as usual.”

“How’s Cyd treating him?” She catches that, the hint of a smirk.

“Fine and dandy, thanks.”

His mouth spreads into a closed-mouth grin. “He’s fucking dissolving in her stomach acid as we speak, isn’t he?”

Shiv can’t help the small smile trying her own mouth. “She might have gotten peckish. Maybe took a bite out of him. Nothing Tom can’t handle.”

“I’ll bet.” Kendall doesn’t say anything more for a beat. His glass is loose in his fingertips and then he brings it to his mouth. He drains most of it in a long gulp. He hunches his shoulders slightly, his attention more targeted now. 

“You talk to Dad? You coming back? Is he bringing you back in? Take Your Daughter to Work Day coming up any time soon?” At least that part hasn’t changed about Kendall. He still asks questions in that staccato, machine gun patter. In another life, he might have done well seated on a congressional committee.

Because the thing is, he’s hit a nerve and he knows it. Dad called her that night after her first day and he told her, in so many words and in the brusque glide of his voice, that it was good to have her for the day and why didn’t she sit tight. It was a dismissal. It was after midnight and the interior of her, a landscape she prided herself on knowing the intimate ins and outs of, any and everything that made her tick and thrive and break, still felt shifted and wrong. Kendall. It was Kendall, his head bowed, tears in his eyes, crying into the shoulder of the suit she had specifically picked out for her first day at Waystar Royco. Kendall, who wouldn’t tell her what happened. 

“There can be no missteps,” Dad said.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” she says to Kendall now. “I’ll be back in soon enough.”

“Right. Whatever would we do without you.” Shiv’s face dips down into a frown before she forces a shit-eating grin. Despite how guarded Kendall is, as anonymous and empty as the apartment he currently calls home, he affords her occasional and jagged views of himself. A flash of annoyance, an unsettling depth of grief, something that disturbingly looks a lot like pity. She doesn’t understand it. Doesn’t understand him anymore. People don’t just get lost to each other.

It’s easy enough though to slip back into combat. “You know, despite what Dad might think and what Dad might say, you both were dead in the water until I walked into that panic room. You know that, right?”

“So we can credit you with putting the gun in that poor bastard’s hand?”

“Fuck off. You know what I mean.” She clasps her hands together between her knees and leans forward. “You guys were nowhere. You needed me to speak her language.”

Distant amusement crowds his face. It’s obnoxious, but better than blank. “Her language seemed to be pretty number-based, when we got down to it. A language you could say I’m pretty fucking fluent in.” He shifts in his seat, more in his element now. “Is that why you stopped by, Shiv? Wanted to make sure you got your name on the byline?”

She scowls. “Please. Like I’m that petty.”

“I think you are. I think you might be.”

He’s got a lot of fucking nerve. None of them have ever known how to share, be it credit or attention or their father. When she had first started fucking Nate—the first go-round with him, before—Kendall had acted like she stuck a knife in his back. “He’s my friend,” he kept saying, the emphasis on the possessive, his outrage impotent and pathetic and as hilarious as it was predictable to her.

“And what? Only you get to fuck your friends?” His face had gone thunderous, angry and insulted in a way that for the first, and maybe only, time he reminded her of their father. 

“Only I get what’s mine,” he snarled.

Now, Kendall’s face is miles away from that, as placid as the end of an antidepressant ad. Shiv sets her glass down on the coffee table. She smoothes her hands down her thighs. 

“I think you’re all gonna need my help to manage Rhea. That's all I'm saying.”

“I liked her,” Kendall says. He almost sounds like he means it. 

“Yeah? Maybe you’ll get lucky and Dad’ll have you fuck her into submission as part of his acquisition strategy.”

Something very cold settles over Kendall’s face before he laughs. Dry, forced, more amused than she thought his broken circuitry was capable of performing. “You think I’m Dad’s whore?”

“If the negligee fits,” she drawls. Silence settles between them. “I don’t know what you are.”

Kendall nods, once and then again. Again, his head ducked. She can remember him clinging to her, even if only briefly. Her hand held in his, placed over his heart. 

“I’m fine,” he says. He lifts his head. “You wanna cut the shit and tell me what you’re actually doing here?” Shiv’s teeth sink into her bottom lip. She silently debates what to say. The things you give someone can be used against you. Everyone knows that. He knows that.

She shrugs. “I was in the neighborhood.”

Kendall stills. That’s another new thing about him: stillness. It’s unsettling. Looking at him is the same as looking into a blank sheet of glass, the windows that surround them now. She has no interest in finding herself in him. 

“Yeah, do I look like someone who’s gonna buy that?”

Shiv’s posture straightens slightly. Her hands are loosely joined in her lap. “I was worried. About you.”

“You were worried about me.”

“If I said you scared the shit out of me the other night, would you take it personally? Hold it against me?”

“As what?”

“I don’t know. A victory.”

“No.”

She pauses. “You scared the shit out of me, Ken.” The dumb part is, he had. She thought about him the rest of that night and into the next morning. The next day. She couldn’t find the understanding or the emotional maturity to articulate the fear that now lived inside of her. That still lives; it hasn’t gone away. 

Tom chose that morning to say to her, “You don’t seem entirely happy,” and at first all she did was laugh. Then, she spiraled out, attempted to remember a time when she was what Tom might consider entirely happy. Happy without complication, which, she assumed, meant a happiness belonging to youth. She recalled a time speeding onto an on-ramp in New Jersey, the car moving fast enough to border on reckless. Dad was driving. She was eating a melted Snickers bar. She felt wild, ungovernable. Happy. She got melted chocolate on the cloth seat and she blamed Roman. Maybe that was what Tom meant. She couldn’t remember what happened next.

By that evening, she made a decision. She called their dad, a bottle of red wine set out before her as a late supper. She was not only not entirely happy but she was something more and worse than that. “It’s probably nothing,” she said, her mouth stained, “but I have some concerns. About Kendall.”

“Pinky, it’s nothing," he said. "I have him in hand."

When she hung up, she could recognize that it was exactly that she feared. In hand, under heel, on a leash—Kendall was broken. He broke Kendall. And, yes, she is frightened of the man Kendall has become, this shell seated across from her, but she is equally afraid of the how. She needs to know how he became like this. She can’t protect herself against the things she doesn’t know. She can’t save herself from their father if she doesn’t know what he did. How he did it.

“I’m fine,” Kendall says again.

“Yeah?”

The faraway look on his face narrows into assessment, aimed at her. He gets to his feet. He’s dismissing her, she thinks, a knife twist of irritation and disappointment within her. 

“I’m not your enemy. You know that, right?”

“Sure,” she says. She stands up. “Okay.”

She follows him to the door. He stops in front of it and turns back to look at her.

“Thanks, you know. For stopping by,” he says, as if gratitude is the farthest thing away from what he’s feeling. His face is more difficult to read in the dark, but there has been something flattened and deadened in his eyes since her wedding to Tom. Something happened to him. Something, and he won’t tell her.

“Yeah.” Shiv pauses. She can’t help herself; she has to know. Her fingers skim the cuff of his sweater, the bony knob of his wrist. “You can tell me,” she says quietly. She lifts her gaze from his hand to his face. “What did he do to you? What did Dad do to you? You gotta tell me.”

Kendall blinks. “Nothing. He did—nothing, Shiv. He didn’t have to do anything.” Despite what he says, his body bows towards hers like he can’t help himself. Like he’s that cold, that lonely, he’ll seek out any heat. Even hers. 

He’s watching her carefully. She wants to look away but she won’t let herself. 

“You wanna know?” he says softly, as if to himself. “I saw myself for who I really am. What I am.” Shiv swallows. He’s too close now, he fills up her entire field of vision. She can feel him against her even though they aren’t touching. “I’m nothing.”

Fear lurches in her chest. “Kendall, what the fuck.”

His grip at the back of her neck is sudden and tight. Painful. His breath hits her in the face. He smells faintly of stale cigarette smoke, whiskey. He presses his forehead to hers. Their noses bump together. Shiv has curled her hands into fists at her side. 

“I’m nothing,” he says again, hot and needy and resigned. 

“Stop it,” she says. Her hands are at his shoulders, uncertain if she wants to push him away or hold him closer. Just as contradictory, he feels too fragile under her grasp, more solid than he has any right to be—decided and real. Anything but nothing. Can’t he feel that? 

His mouth is still looming there, so close to hers. She pushes him and his back hits the door. He pulls her with him, his fingers snarling in the ends of her hair, his other hand just as tight on her arm. Their bodies are flush against each other, a mockery of an embrace. She is just as rigid against him as he is to her, tension strung between and through them. Kendall’s face is hidden in the crook of her neck. She can see his pulse fluttering there, his throat working as he speaks. “I’m nothing.” Shiv doesn’t so much as hold him as press her weight into him, pinning him to the door.

“You don’t want my pity,” she says, harsh and mean as she can muster. She could bury her face in the side of his neck if she wanted to, the angle’s right. It’s there, on offer. She pictures Kendall, shoplifting. A melted Snickers slipped into his pocket. Sad and pathetic, all the more so for getting caught. 

The Kendall who lifts his face to hers is both these things, but also neither. His eyes are hooded, his mouth dark. Anticipatory. 

“No,” he agrees. There is a leap at the corner of his jaw, a tic. “What do I want?”

“You need me to tell you? You don’t know?” Her voice should sound harder than it does. Kendall gives her a small shake of his head. His eyes are brighter now, lit by something she can’t recognize. That she knows better than to trust. She should know better. He takes her hand and he lifts it to his throat. Honest surprise kicks through her, fear nipping at its heels. The fear is different this time. It’s not Kendall she’s afraid of, not really. It’s her. She’s afraid of what she might do. She doesn’t move; her fingertips are barely touching the warm skin of his throat. 

“Don’t make me beg,” he says. A pleading note is already present in his voice, straining it. His throat bobs under her hand. 

“If I did?” There’s a tremble to her own voice now.

Kendall exhales, like relief. “I would.”

Shiv inhales quickly. “Then do it.”

He doesn’t do anything for a brief moment other than study her. In the darkness of his apartment his face is sharp, predatory, a resurrected shade of the man she used to know as her brother. “Shiv, please.”

“Please what?” She lets her fingers stroke over his neck. He swallows again. Through very little effort she has left behind any behavior that might be considered defensible. She knows what he wants from her. The condemned man wants the noose to finally tighten. She thinks she might like the role of executioner more than she would ever admit out loud. She won’t give him that, not without his own confession. Each word she says is careful and precise: “You have to ask for what you fucking want.”

She can feel it, the beat and skip, the immediate escalation of his pulse. The restless draw of his body. 

“Please,” and even if non-specific, he is begging openly now. His grip tightens around her wrist. “Please, just do it. Don’t make me say it.”

Shiv lifts her other hand to join around his throat. Her grip is still open and lax, barely there. A threat. She rests her forearm against his chest and she can feel his heart hammering. “Are you ashamed?” she asks, the question gentle, a subtle knife. Kendall doesn’t say anything. His mouth parts open, a wet sticking sound like the start of grunt. She gives him an experimental squeeze around his throat with both of her hands and his entire body reacts. He arches away from the door and into her, blunt fingernails dig into the back of her hand, his mouth slackens before he grits his teeth.

“Fuck, please, Shiv.”

“You sick fuck,” she whispers. And then she gives in. She gives him what he wants. She starts to choke him.

What Shiv has always liked about a man under her was the sense of conquest. Watching a man go unmade, brought down to his basest and his most malleable instincts—by her. She measures out her triumphs to help define the woman she is and might become, and these—these unraveled, breathless men—she holds hot and proud and silent inside her. Kendall is no different, except for how he is. How in turn that makes her different, too.

Her hands are locked around his throat, her grip unforgiving and cruel. No less, she tells herself as power surges through her, than he deserves. It’s as unnerving as it is intoxicating. Her own breath has gone ragged, her cheeks flushed. Kendall’s mouth is gaping open, his eyes black, and she thinks he has never been more unknown to her than he is right now. He grasps at her hip and without thinking she leans into him. His cheeks are flushed too, his face bright with the freedom that only comes with a lack of control. His hips make abortive thrusts against her; he can’t stop himself. She can feel him. He’s hard. She feels sick. Her fingers dig into his throat roughly and, shocked at the violence of it, she immediately loosens her grip.

Kendall coughs. “No,” he croaks. He coughs again, gasping, dangerously close to wheezing. “No.” She did that. She did that to him. “Fucking give it to me.” Even with his voice strained and cracked, he’s as assertive as she’s heard him in a long while. “Fucking,” he starts to stay so she tightens her grip around his throat, still looser than before, hopeful he’ll stop talking. 

He does.

He’s foolish to trust her. She wants to tell him that. You shouldn’t place your life—your job, your future, your throat—in anyone else’s hands. She doesn’t say that and she doesn’t ask herself what all she wants to do to him. She slots her thigh between his legs. He opens to her, his own leg fitting too well, snug and satisfying, between hers.

“What is wrong with you?” She says it even as she rocks down onto his thigh, the seam of her trousers tight and good against her. Kendall bucks against her. She can feel his cock against her hip. He moves his hip again, slower this time. His hands grab at her ass to hold her steady, filthy and demanding in how he handles her. How he ruts against her. Like she’s not the only one who could do anything here. 

Shiv drops one hand from around his throat while the other continues to squeeze, the pressure varying, chasing the sounds he lets leave his mouth. She drags her fingers roughly through his hair and pulls, baring that much more of his throat to her. He is making broken noises now, whining and desperate, still grinding himself against her. Shiv can’t catch her breath. She jerks his head to the side.

“You’re not nothing,” she snarls against his ear. She sucks in a breath. “You’re fucked.”

“Yes,” he pants. “Yes.”

His fingers dig into the swell of her ass, rough enough to bruise. He’s so far gone she could tell him anything and he would agree. She presses her face against the side of his, her mouth still at his ear. She can smell him, taste him. She doesn’t have to look at him. “Go on then,” she says, "fucking take what you want," and the words are quiet enough, private enough, that she lets herself believe she can take them back. 

It’s all he needs. She feels him jerk against her, a sound caught in him that sounds too similar to the noise he made when she hugged him in Dad’s office. He’s coming. He’s still moving against her, sluggish and near lazy, his breathing overloud and labored.

She isn’t fully expecting it when he pulls back from her. He slumps against the door, his weight and his heat taken from her. There’s a wet spot on the front of his sweatpants. He coughs and she watches him. He watches her. She’s shaking. She can’t decide if she feels more betrayed by him or by herself. 

She doesn’t move. She doesn’t have to say anything. Kendall comes to her. He presses the heel of his palm between her legs. The pressure is firm as he starts to rub and his cheek is rough with stubble as it drags against hers. She clutches at him, grinds down into his hand, and it’s easy. It’s so fucking easy. She closes her eyes. She comes quickly, disturbing for its effortlessness. 

Shame, guilt, self-loathing: they all quickly race through her. She shoves him away. She’s uncomfortably wet between her legs. When she looks up, she can see the reddened marks her hands left around his throat. Her chin trembles; she thinks she wants to cry. 

“Shiv,” she hears Kendall say.

She holds up a hand. “Don’t.”

“You don’t need to worry about me,” he finally says. Kendall reaches, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. Shiv swats his hand away. She makes herself look at him. He’s right there in front of her, his gaze shifting from her eyes to settle on her mouth. Sudden terror rushes up that he might kiss her. He’s close enough, he could do it. It’s followed fast by the even worse fear that might be something she wants.

Instead, he touches his throat. He rubs his fingers over where she knows there will be bruises tomorrow. There’s nothing cowed in him now. He’s not afraid to meet her eye, not with the glint now present in his. The corners of his mouth lift slightly.

“I see you too, you know. I fucking see you.”

Shiv says nothing. She snatches her coat up and she pushes past him. Out the door, into the hall. She freezes there, eyes first the elevator and then the door at the end of the hall. She goes to it, pushes it open, and she steps into the stairwell. Unlike the rest of the building, it has been barely touched since initial construction. Cement stairs and cinderblock walls, the floor number stenciled in spray paint. She takes in a shuddering breath and it echoes. She begins her descent. Her legs finally stop shaking when she reaches the street. When she looks down at her hands, her fingers twitch. 


End file.
